initial exposure

- initial exposure

Let’s begin with the epitome of rage, vampires and werewolves. It is enjoyable to be frightened by them from the security of our favorite chair or a movie theater seat surrounded by friends.  These wild creatures allow us to experience our inner rage, to feel both the wonderful power and the horror of rage unleashed.  And, in most stories civilized behavior wins out over the demonic forces, even though the protagonists may have to briefly embrace their own inner wolf to defeat the demons.  Yet these tales are short releases, brief respites from the occurrence of real rage.  While they let us succumb to it, join with it for some period of time, they serve mainly to remind us that we are supposed to be civilized, social beings who do not give in to dark powers.  Rarely do they show us how to understand or deal with rage in our daily lives; we just get through it.  It is time to revisit the stories, the myths, and our own inner urges and see whether a path to understanding, to treatment when necessary, is available.

The literature regarding werewolves and vampires and such is too large and too diverse to examine in detail here, so only a small portion will be mentioned and just a few of the most extensive works referred to, without detailed citation.  The majority of the existing literature has taken a theological or philosophical position.  The authors try to prove or disprove the existence of such creatures, and whether they are abominations or are objects of intrigue.  Montague Summers’ The Werewolf in Lore and Legend published in 1933 is a vast compendium of earlier records.  It is recent enough that it is presented in concepts at least slightly comprehensible to 21^st century thought. Yet reading it requires a strong comprehension of Latin, Greek, German, Olde English, and other languages, thereby greatly limiting its audience.  More recent books, in particular Charlotte Montague’s Vampires (2010), aim to compile a complete guide to the mythology of vampires (with some references to werewolves) in 21^st century terms and embracing the new wave of interest in these wild and powerful creatures. 

These compendiums are interesting to read.  What is very clear, however, is that vampires and werewolves comprise a wide variety of characteristics and ideas that do not coalesce into any single story.  These reviews make it clear that it would be fruitless to try to cobble together all the different ideas into one story.  And yet there are many overlapping and recurrent images that indicate that there is a commonality, not based on philosophical or theological theorems, but in real life.  So, rather than trying to create a Frankenstein by attempting to knit together disparate accounts, guessing, we will view these records by comparing them with a specific biological mechanism that we can examine with modern diagnostic tools.  We will determine how much of the tales or werewolves and vampires can be accounted for directly by this mechanism, and then we can evaluate whether remaining accounts have the characteristics of combinations of historical notions.  Therefore, we begin our own investigation by claiming outright that the effects of the rabies virus on humans and other mammals can, and do, account for the specific manifestations of werewolves and vampires.  Answering the question of whether supernatural beings and forces exist is simply thrown over by the question of the meaning of vampiric and werewolf-like behavior in humans.  This is the real excitement; to understand more about ourselves, even to accept that some surprising, even frightening, behaviors are normal!  The enticement of the recent literature involving vampires and werewolves is their humanity, their struggle to become human, that is, our own struggle to recover from our inner monsters.  Becoming human, adult, is what we all try do every day!  Civilization and civilized behavior are, to a large extent, an attempt to bring some behaviors under our conscious, voluntary control. 

One of the wonders of rabies, as we will see, is that it does not damage or even reorganize our nervous system in order to produce the seemingly bizarre, abnormal behavior associated with infection.  Rabies simply takes advantage of standard, prepotent scripts in our behavioral repertoire and enhances some to its own advantage. For the rabies virus (as for vampires) that selfish advantage is to complete the biological imperative to reproduce.  Rabies virus can only survive if it turns another person into a host for the virus, i.e., into another rabid creature.  Rabies can only be transferred by introducing infected saliva from one rabid person/animal into the body of another, that is, by biting them.  The image of turning a new victim is a perfectly apt description of how rabies survives and spreads.